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For decades,
political analysts have heralded the Latino vote as a “sleeping giant” that
will solidify Democrats’ hold on power. But in cycle after cycle, turnout
remains dismal.

By MARCELA VALDES / New York Times

SEPT.
14, 2016

Two
weeks after Hillary Clinton accepted the Democratic presidential nomination in
Philadelphia, beaming through a hail of gigantic balloons, her campaign’s
“Latinos con Hillary” program began in five cities in Virginia. One of the
kickoff parties took place at Todos Supermarket in Prince William County, in a
modest white room where about 40 people gathered around three tables draped in
cheap blue cloth to hear a speech by Clinton’s national Latino-vote director,
Lorella Praeli. When she was 2, Praeli, now 28, lost one of her legs in a car
accident, but with her crutches, she commanded the room more adroitly than any
of the speakers who preceded her, moving among the tables as she rallied her
troops. Though the party was advertised on Facebook, most of the men and women
in attendance were seasoned Democratic politicians, staff members and
volunteers.

“I’m
not here to make it pretty,” Praeli said. “The work ahead of us, the task and
challenge ahead of us for the next what — 96 days — is huge.” She ticked through the efforts needed
to register and turn out Latinos: knocking on doors, hosting phone-bank
parties, convincing friends, haunting markets, teaching Spanish-speakers the
how and the when and the where of voting. In her speech, the job sounded
herculean. Near the end of her pitch, she asked everyone to stand and feel the
energy in the room while they said, in Spanish, “We will be the difference.”

“I
want you to say it and to believe it,” Praeli instructed. “I want you to say it
and to commit yourself.” She smiled, but these were marching orders. “If we
don’t believe it, other people won’t believe,” Praeli said in Spanish. “If we
don’t believe it in this room, we won’t be the difference in November.”

Latinos
have been hearing that they will be the difference for decades. In Spanish-language
media this year, the rhetoric around the election has often gone so far as to
imply that Latinos will decide the result on their own. Telemundo’s election
coverage runs under the slogan “Yo Decido,” “I Decide.” The Univision news
anchor Jorge Ramos told
The Times last year that “the new rule in American politics is that no one
can make it to the White House without the Hispanic vote.”

It’s
true enough that 800,000 Latinos turn 18 every year, and both parties burn
millions of dollars trying to woo Hispanic voters. This year, 27
million will be eligible to vote. But the idea of a fearsome Latino
political power remains more myth than reality. Journalists have been writing
about the so-called “sleeping giant” of Hispanic voters since at least the
1970s, but the fact is that voter turnout among Latinos remains dismal. It can
run almost 20 percentage points lower than that of African-Americans and
non-Hispanic whites. Exactly the same percentage of eligible Latinos, 48
percent, showed up for Romney versus Obama in 2012 as turned out for Bush
versus Dukakis in 1988. While the raw number of Latino ballots cast has tripled
since 1998, so has the number of Latino citizens who don’t vote. Only once in
the past 28 years, during the 1992 match among George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton
and Ross Perot that spurred a jump in overall turnout, has Latino turnout
exceeded 50 percent. More often than not, “Yo Decido” to stay home.

This
year, the new spin on the old dream is that Donald Trump will finally shake the
giant awake. He opened his campaign last summer by calling Mexican immigrants
“rapists,” has repeatedly proclaimed that he will build a wall between Mexico
and the United States and, until recently, has made the deportation of 11
million undocumented immigrants a cornerstone of his platform. As early as
September 2015, Javier Palomarez, the president and chief executive of the U.S.
Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, told
Politico: “I think the greatest thing to ever happen to the Hispanic
electorate is a gentleman named Donald Trump. He has crystallized the angst and
anger of the Hispanic community.” He added, “I think we can all rest assured
that Hispanics can turn out in record numbers.”

Perhaps.
But achieving record turnout for a demographic with a lackluster voting history
isn’t so simple as watching them take themselves to the polls. In June, Mi
Familia Vota and the National Council of La Raza, two nonprofit groups devoted
to organizing Latinos, warned that they needed more cash to match their voter
registration numbers from 2012. In July, the Pew
Research Center noted that “Hispanic voters lag all registered voters on
several measures of engagement” — they aren’t paying attention to election news
as closely as other citizens and they aren’t thinking about the election as
much. At a conference on the Hispanic vote held in New York City in January,
the big unanswered question was “Why have Latinos never really turned out in
force?”

Looking
for answers, I spent six months interviewing scores of Latinos in Virginia, a
battleground state where the Latino share of the population has more than
tripled since 1990. I met with Latino Catholics, Pentecostals and Mormons, with
legal residents, citizens and undocumented immigrants. I frequented a church
and a community center, soccer fields and a dance club. I lurked around
Republican and Democratic events and a skateboard park. I interviewed
custodians and construction workers, lawyers and real estate agents, restaurant
owners and community organizers, college students and political staffers. In
all, I spoke with more than 100 Virginians of various ethnic backgrounds.

For
all the energy that activists, especially on the Democratic side, have put into
turning out the Latino vote, I met strikingly few Latinos outside the
upper-middle class who talked about voting as if it were something they did
regularly. The exceptions tended to be people like Lucía Rodriguez, 61, who
cleans houses and has voted regularly for more than a decade — even in 2008
after she and her husband, a custodian, saw all their savings vanish in the
mortgage crisis. For years afterward, they scrambled to keep their family
afloat, working every available hour. Yet she kept on voting. Why? “It’s a
civic duty,” she said. Rodriguez explained that in Bolivia, where she had been
an accountant, she learned the habit of voting because nonvoters could be
penalized with fines. In her Mormon church in the United States, she was
surrounded by friends who voted. To pass her citizenship test, she had to study
American government and learn English. Her voting behavior entailed years of
effort and experience. Through all my conversations, I began to fear that the
real roots of political engagement, which lie not in quadrennial outreach
programs but around dinner tables and in churches and classrooms, are far more
absent from Latino life in America than most people understand.

“A person on the fence needs to be activated
to turn into a voter,” Marvin Figueroa, 30, said one humid Friday in July as he
stood before a crowd of white-collar professionals at a “Happy Hour for
Hillary.” These borderline voters, he said, often need “13 touches” — calls,
door knocks, texts, etc. — before they would turn out. Figueroa is Clinton’s
political director for Virginia. His spreadsheets contain not only Latinos but
also African-Americans, millennials and Muslims: any constituent group that
might be pulled into a pro-Clinton coali­tion. This evening, inside the
Arlington home of a defense contractor who turned Democrat after the Tea Party
swept into Congress in 2010, the audience was mostly female, mostly Caucasian
and only marginally Latino. The doors to the screened-in porch were open; the
air-conditioning was off; the margarita machine was on. The Spanish speakers
blended into the crowd.

Statistically,
the Latinos most likely to cast ballots are almost identical to other reliable
American voters. They are over 40. They’ve lived in the United States for at
least 20 years. They are Puerto Ricans and Cuban-Americans with long cultural
histories of citizenship. They are college graduates.

The
Latinos least likely to vote represent a different demographic slice
altogether. They are under 30, single and Mexican-American. Their families earn
less than $50,000 a year. They may not have completed high school.

Data
capsules like these suggest that the Latino vote is simply hamstrung by the
same factors that impede the Election Day turnout of all Americans: poverty,
youth, lack of schooling. Political scientists showed long ago that voting goes
hand in glove with affluence and education. Generally speaking, the wealthier
you are, the more degrees you earn, the more likely you are to turn out. But if
these were the only relevant factors, Latino voting would most likely rise naturally
over time as more Latinos enrolled in college and as the age of the average
American-born Latino increased. (In 2012 their average age was 18.)

Causality
unravels, however, when you start picking at the numbers. Take income, for
example. While nearly a quarter of Latinos live in poverty, as a group they are
slightly better off than African-Americans. Yet in 2012, African-Americans had
the highest turnout rates in the nation. They, not Latinos, have arguably been
the decisive bloc in our last two presidential contests and in this year’s
Democratic primary. So poverty alone can’t explain the weak Hispanic vote.

Youth
and education also prove to be red herrings. Hispanics are America’s youngest
and least-educated major racial or ethnic group. Nearly a third of foreign-born
Latinos never reached ninth grade. Some have never had a day of schooling in
their lives. But if age and learning were the decisive catalysts, we would
expect to find the highest voter turnout among Asian-Americans, who are our
second-oldest and best-educated group. More than half of Asian-Americans hold
bachelors degrees. Yet Asian-Americans tend to vote at even lower rates than
Latinos. In 2012, 53 percent of their eligible voters did not go to the polls.

So
what do Asians and Hispanics, two vastly different groups in terms of age,
education and culture, have in common? It’s obvious once you look for it: For
the past 30 years, most of America’s immigrants have arrived from Asia and
Latin America. Both groups struggle with English. Roughly a
third of Hispanic adults and a 10th of Hispanic children say that they
cannot speak English “very well.” Among Asians, the numbers are similar.

The
American political system once efficiently trained immigrants in how to pull
electoral levers. For all their flaws, urban political machines like Tammany
Hall did an extraordinary job of recruiting poor, undereducated Irish and
Italian immigrants, then shepherding their political incorporation into local
and national affairs. But immigrants from Latin America and Asia were largely
excluded from the old machines, both by laws limiting their naturalization and
enfranchisement and by racism. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was not extended
to Hispanics and Asians until 1975. By then most of the urban machines had been
dismantled, and the leading edge of our current
wave of Asian and Hispanic immigrants began unpacking their bags in Los
Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Atlanta and Washington.

The
immigrants from Latin America immediately found themselves lumped together
under the label “Hispanic,” even if they spoke Portuguese or an indigenous
language, even if they had no ancestral link to Spain. It’s tough to galvanize
such a heterogeneous group. The panethnic, multilingual category of “Hispanic”
is a uniquely American invention, created by congressional legislation in the
1970s. In her book “Making Hispanics,” G. Cristina Mora shows how bureaucrats,
media executives and political activists built the notion to combine
Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, Puerto Ricans and others in census counts
and federal programs. The term was always deliberately ambiguous, Mora notes,
so that it could accommodate varied origin stories. There are Hispanics who
swam the Rio Grande hoping for a living wage, Hispanics who flew business class
to enroll in Ivy League schools, Hispanics who disembarked as Cold Warriors in
Florida. There are even Hispanics whose families owned land in the Southwest
before it was ever part of the United States. (These “Hispanics” like to joke
that they didn’t cross the border; the border crossed them.) Unlike
African-Americans, most of whom can trace a connection to slavery, Latinos have
no single common history. Trump, Figueroa once told me, “makes us more Latino”:
His threats and insults provoke a unifying sense of indignation.

Note: White, black, and Asian
populations include only non-Hispanics who reported a single race. Native
Americans and mixed-race groups not shown. The estimated number of votes cast
is based on individual voting self-reports. Source: Pew Research Center

Sifting
thorough the numbers and this complicated history makes the 52 percent of
nonvoting Latinos look rather different. The problem isn’t their youth, poverty
or lack of education. The problem is that when you’re poor, young or
undereducated, it takes more effort to overcome your immigrant family’s low
levels of political socialization. For first-generation Americans, politics is
often just one more cultural expression that they must decipher on their own.
It’s rarely a priority. The immigrant parents that I spoke with swam rivers and
boarded airplanes to escape violence, to earn money, to educate their children.
Learning to play American politics was never on the agenda.

In
Virginia, I found that serious political talk was so rare among the
American-born children of Spanish-speaking immigrants that they would often ask
me questions like “What is the Tea Party?” and “Who is my mayor?” Alicio
Castañeda, a student at George Mason University whose parents are from Mexico,
told me that after we had lunch in April, he began reading more news articles
and researching deeper into the presidential candidates. He voted on Super
Tuesday. His love for the soccer team Manchester United had led him to The
Guardian newspaper, which reminded him that it was a big day in America. “I’ve
always been personally interested in politics,” he told me, “but I haven’t had
anyone to talk to about it.”

Until
the 1960s, high schools often taught courses on democracy, civics and
government. At the turn of the 21st century, most teenagers received one such
class, or none. This drought in civics hurts all Americans, but for Latinos
it’s devastating. Several studies have found that merely hearing parents chat
about politics or watching them cast a ballot improves the odds that a child
will later vote as an adult. Yet a national survey directed by Mark Hugo Lopez
in 2002 found that young Latinos were the least likely to have discussed
politics with their parents. They were also the most likely to believe that
voting is “difficult.”

On
Super Tuesday, I glimpsed what was missing among so many of the Latino families
I spoke with when I met Kat Heller, a non-Hispanic mother, exiting a polling
station with two children. Growing up in Minnesota, Heller had always tagged
along with her parents when they voted. Once, when she was about 12, her father
took her to watch the ballots being counted. “I just remember feeling it was
really exciting,” she told me. “It was seeing history happening. Everyone was
waiting breathlessly.” Inside the voting booth on Super Tuesday, Heller put her
3-year-old son on her hip and asked him: “Which do you think we should vote for?”
His 13 touches had already begun.

Absent Tammany
Hall and
civics in schools, the work of turning “new Americans” into voters often falls
to volunteers like Keisy Chavez. Several weekends this summer, Chavez, 45, has
stood outside of Todos Supermarket and other locations in Northern Virginia,
clipboard in hand, fishing for Latinos who haven’t registered to vote. On the
Saturday morning that I joined her, she looked surprisingly stylish for the
occasion: gold-toned sandals, brilliant white capri pants, fiery nails and a
bright orange T-shirt blazoned with the words “New Virginia Majority.” You
could not engineer a better volunteer than Chavez to help turn out the Latino
vote. Political appeals, social scientists have found, work best when delivered
by co-ethnics. Chavez meets other requirements as well: She’s bilingual,
outgoing and frank.

A
good rate for voter registration is two new registrations an hour. Chavez and
her colleague hit the mark with four new registrations between them (the
colleague waited for Chavez every time someone’s dominant language was
Spanish). Still, most passers-by ignored them. One 20-something with jet black
hair who did stop told Chavez, in Spanish, that he was a citizen but not
registered. She tried to reel him in.

“O.K.,”
she responded with a smile, “what is the problem?”

He
said that he would come back to register next week, that she should give him
her phone number.

“What
happens if you don’t come next week?” she asked him.

“I
promise you.”

“You
know what happens,” she said. “If you don’t do it now, four more years will go
by, and you won’t vote.”

Back
and forth they went for several minutes. Finally, seeing that Chavez wouldn’t
give him her number, the man walked away without registering. Winning votes,
Lola Quintela of the Fairfax County Democratic Committee told me, is “trabajo de hormiga” — ants’ work,
performed grain by grain.

The
political scientist Lisa García Bedolla proposed a different method in a
2005 paper for The Harvard Journal of Hispanic Policy. Because political
engagement is strongly influenced by social ties, she argues, Latinos should
improve their participation by politicizing their existing social networks.
(She also pushes for civics in schools.) Several of the Latinos I met seemed to
vote only because they were connected to a political junkie. Manuel Fernandez,
25, a Mexican-American born in New York State, prefers rebuilding and drifting
cars to reading politics, but he has voted in local and presidential elections
since he turned 18 because his father, Guadencio, a businessman, persuaded him
to register to vote and tells him when and how to cast his ballots. “Dad is
really into it,” he said. “Whenever my dad says it’s voting time, we go vote.”

The
Clinton campaign is splitting its strategy between the tactics. After analyzing
which programs worked best during the primaries, Praeli began pushing an
expansion of Nevada’s bilingual Mujeres in Politics program in battleground and
“expansion” states across the country. Mujeres in Politics marshals Latinas for
the ant work of canvassing and phone banking, but it also relies on social ties
to deepen the campaign’s reach into Latino communities. Each Latina who
participates is tasked with the responsibility of drawing in five more Latina
volunteers.

“The
theory for us was if you target Latinas and then you have Latinas talk to other
Latinas, they’re the best communicators to do that,” Praeli told me. “We see
them as the C.E.O.s of their family and their communities. Part of my program
description is you need to know that bodega with the highest foot traffic or
the church secretary that can give you access to a faith community or who are
the comadres in the
neighborhood that have the largest influence. All you have to do is talk to a
Latina to really understand that.” Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Latinas have
voted in higher numbers than Latinos or that they were a key base for Clinton
in the primaries.

Chavez
herself was lured into politics by a Latina friend. For years after she settled
in Virginia from Peru, she earned money washing dishes, waitressing, cleaning
bathrooms, cleaning offices, “cleaning anything,” she says. At one point she
held three jobs: a full-time job, a part-time job and a weekend job cleaning
the airport at night. In 1996, she earned her real estate license. Then in
2009, after a friend asked her to walk with Terry McAuliffe in a parade, she
was so smitten by his concern for Latinos that she decided to volunteer for his
campaign for governor. For Chavez, the experience was intoxicating: “I was
like, ‘Whoa, I did not know any of this existed.’”
She has volunteered for Virginia Democrats every year since then. Election
season feels like a party to her. “I have the best time,” she told me. When
Praeli spoke at the “Latinos con Hillary” event at Todos, Chavez was there,
dressed head to toenails in blue.

The widespread
assumption
has been that rising numbers of Hispanic citizens will turn Virginia and other
states in the South permanently Democratic. Certainly, with each election since
2001, Virginia Democrats have expanded their network of experienced Latino
staff members and volunteers. Praeli and Figueroa’s work depends on these
veterans, a fact that Clinton tacitly acknowledged before Figueroa was even
hired. On June 11, five days after The
Associated Press called the Democratic primary for Hillary Clinton, the
former president Bill Clinton held a closed-door round table in Arlington with
about 20 key Latino leaders from all over the state. He, like Praeli after him,
was rallying troops.

But
Latinos aren’t natural Democrats, any more than they are natural Republicans.
In 1984, Ronald Reagan won the presidency with nearly half their vote in
California. In 2004, George W. Bush won a second term with 40 percent of the national
Latino vote, setting off panic in Democratic circles. And even in 2012, 33
percent of the Latino vote in Virginia went to Mitt Romney. He also took 39
percent of the Latino vote in Florida and 42 percent in Ohio.

From
the beginning, Latino voters have been up for grabs. The national electoral
bloc that we now call the Hispanic vote was created by middle- and upper-class
Mexican-American Democrats who wanted more clout in government and politics.
According to the historian Ignacio M. García’s book on the subject, they
organized “Viva Kennedy” clubs in Texas, California, New Mexico, Indiana, Illinois
and elsewhere. Working together under an absurd logo of John Kennedy riding a
grinning burro, these grass-roots clubs turned out thousands of Spanish
speakers in delegate-rich states, helping Kennedy squeak into the White House
by a margin of less than 1 percent of the popular vote. But Republicans pushed
the strategy further: In “Making Hispanics,” Mora shows how members of Richard
Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign, who nicknamed themselves the “Brown Mafia,”
ran Spanish-language ads on radio and television. They crafted three distinct
campaigns to bring in not just Mexican-Americans but also Puerto Ricans and
Cuban-Americans. With their help, Nixon was re-elected by a landslide, taking
about 35 percent of what was then known as the “Spanish speaking” vote. The
real loss for Republicans since President George W. Bush left office is that
their candidates have frittered away the affections that he and Reagan earned
among Latinos.

Many
conservative Hispanics I spoke with in Virginia told me that they don’t fit
neatly into either party. They would prefer a candidate who legalizes
undocumented immigrants, outlaws abortion, makes college education free, wipes
out drugs and gangs, rolls back the legal right to gay marriage, supports
small-business credits and raises the minimum wage. Immigration reform might be
a distinguishing concern for Latinos, but a recent
report from Pew found that, as in previous presidential contests, it is not
the top issue for Latino voters. More Latino voters say that the economy,
health care and terrorism are very important.

Several
of the Catholic Latinos I met said that abortion laws were their top priority.
“If we can close that one clinic,” Iris Chavez told me with a sparkle in her
eye, referring to a Planned Parenthood-like women’s clinic that was once
located in Manassas, “we can set fire to the nation.” Chavez, 26, was brought
into the United States illegally from El Salvador when she was 11 and was
protected by Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which Obama created in
2012 for undocumented millennials who came to the United States as children.
She works part-time as a secretary at All Saints Catholic Church, where so many
Latinos attend the Sunday afternoon, Spanish-language Mass that they spill from
the pews to stand three to four deep against the walls. She doesn’t much like
Donald Trump, she told me, but if she could vote, she would vote for him based
on her belief that abortion is murder.

Percentage of Hispanic registered voters identifying with
each party

Note: For all years, includes
respondents who say they consider themselves a Democrat or Republican or lean
toward the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. Responses of “neither,”
“other,” “don't know/refused,” are not shown. Source: Pew Research Center

Chavez
is the kind of Latino that Nixon’s “Brown Mafia” was after — the same kind that
Reagan tried to embrace with his 1986 amnesty, which legalized 2.7 million
Hispanics who had no criminal history, and the kind that Reince Priebus had
hoped the Republican National Committee’s 2012 election autopsy would provoke
Republicans to seek again. If the party had followed George W. Bush’s lead,
Todos Supermarket might have become a site for G.O.P. events. Carlos Castro,
its owner, considered himself “almost 100 percent Republican” until 2007, when
the Republicans of Prince William County championed an anti-Hispanic
“Immigration Resolution,” and he began to reconsider. He’s now an independent.
Other conservatives in the county told me that they would keep their votes out
of everybody’s reach until a candidate arrives whom they can fully support.

The specter of
Trump has
roused many Latinos to change their minds about registering; spikes have been
documented in North Carolina and Georgia. In California, the rise in
registrations early this year was almost double
what it was during the same period in 2012. Jairo Castillo, a
Nicaraguan-American construction worker in Virginia, complained to me in April
that the vote “doesn’t count,” but after Trump secured the Republican
nomination in June, he registered to vote for the first time.

Even
if a “Trump effect” among Latinos this year does help put Clinton in the White
House, will those new voters stay engaged? History suggests they might not.
According to the political scientists Matt Barreto and Gary M. Segura, more
than a million Latinos in California registered to vote for the first time in
the years after the state passed Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot initiative.
Prop. 187 prohibited undocumented immigrants from state-funded institutions,
like schools, and required police officers to report their arrests to federal
immigration authorities. In a statewide election, the initiative passed with 59
percent of the vote. Pete Wilson, the Republican governor who had championed
the measure, won re-election that same fall. Prop. 187 was soon tied up in
federal court, which ruled many of its elements unconstitutional, but
California’s electorate soon went on to pass a ban on affirmative action (Prop.
209) and a reduction in bilingual education (Prop. 227). Both measures were
widely regarded as anti-Hispanic.

Prop.
187 and its cousins had notoriously partisan effects in California. In a paper
published in The American Journal of Political Science in 2006, the
political scientists Shaun Bowler, Stephen P. Nicholson and Segura found that
before 1994 Latinos split their votes almost equally between the two parties.
By contrast, after the passage of these propositions, the probability that a
Latino would identify as Republican fell by more than two-thirds, erasing all
the gains that Republicans made since Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign. Data also
revealed that the propositions moved many non-Hispanic whites in California
into the Democratic column. Attacking undocumented immigrants and Latinos had provoked
a white backlash against Republicans that mirrors the disaffection that Trump’s
nomination has stirred among many party moderates this season.

But
as time went on, Prop. 187’s effect on Latino turnout revealed itself to be not
a turning point but a blip. Last September, The Los
Angeles Times noted that only 17 percent of eligible California Latinos
voted in 2014. Turnout was similar among Asian-Americans, while all other
racial and ethnic groups combined voted more than twice as much. “By all
accounts, the Central Valley is a place where Latino candidates should win
elections,” the reporter Kate Linthicum noted. “Yet Latino candidates’ election
losses have piled up here in recent years — in large part because Latinos
aren’t turning out to vote.”

Among
those defeated in 2014 was Amanda Renteria, now the national political director
for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Renteria ran for Congress in a
Central Valley district that was 74 percent Hispanic. She grew up in the
Central Valley and taught math at her old high school in Woodlake before
attending Harvard Business School and becoming the first Latina chief of staff
in the history of the Senate. She lost her 2014 bid for Congress by 17 points.
If Latinos had turned out for her at the levels that African-Americans turned
out for Obama, it’s possible that today she would sit in Congress.

This
March, the Public Policy Institute of California released a report
that detailed the gulf that has opened up in California politics since the
Prop. 187 surge. “Voters in California,” it noted, “tend to be older, white,
college educated, affluent and homeowners. They also tend to identify
themselves as ‘haves’ — rather than ‘have-nots’ — when asked to choose between
these two economic categories. Nonvoters tend to be younger, Latino, renters,
less affluent and less likely to be college educated than likely voters — and
they generally identify themselves as have-nots.”

California
may be a majority-minority state in terms of its population, the report
observed, but its electorate is not: 60 percent of its likely voters are white,
while only 18 percent are Latino. It would be naïve, however, to expect
Democrats to throw themselves wholeheartedly into the project of turning out
the state’s Hispanics given that they already control solid majorities in
California’s State Assembly and State Senate.

“We
have to be honest,” María Teresa Kumar, the president and co-founder of Voto Latino,
a nonpartisan organization, told me last fall. “When it comes to voter
registration, each party is looking to the Latino community and the
African-American community for enough votes. They don’t need us all.” From her
office in Washington, she directs efforts to engage young Latinos who are often
navigating the political system for their families. “Our job,” Kumar said, “is
to do true political empowerment: It’s mass mobilization and mass
participation. And for parties, it’s about how little do they need to spend to
get over the top.”

If Virginia’s
battleground
status suggests a triumph of the Latino vote, it also provides a cautionary
tale about its limitations. In early August, Senator Tim Kaine, Hillary
Clinton’s running mate, appeared in the green-and-yellow gymnasium of Huguenot
High School in Richmond. “Yes, we Kaine!” the crowd shouted under the
floodlights. His homecoming rally doubled as a history lesson. Kaine pointed
out that Virginia had gone 170 years without a president or vice-president. When
he moved to Virginia in 1984, he said, neither Republicans nor Democrats
bothered to campaign in the state, a situation that he attributed to a
conservative lock on power that depended upon marginalizing women and
minorities. “We pushed you away from the table,” he said. But since Barack
Obama turned Virginia into a battleground, it has become a campaign stop for
every would-be president. “It’s much better to live in state where no one can
take you for granted,” Kaine said.

The
shift that brought volunteers like Keisy Chavez to the Democratic table
actually began long before Obama. When Mark Warner was elected governor in
2001, his campaign strategy relied on winning rural, Nascar-loving Republicans,
not on including minorities. But Kaine’s own gubernatorial victory in 2005 used
an urban-suburban strategy that relied upon the participation of Northern
Virginia’s fast-growing, multiethnic communities. Given Kaine’s experiences
arguing civil rights cases and his work as a missionary in Honduras, the shift may
have reflected personal affinities. It was also a canny response to Virginia’s
changing demographics. According to the University of Virginia’s Demographics
Research Group, in 1970 only one in 100 Virginians were born outside of the
United States. By 2012, that ratio had increased to one in nine. Such
demographic transformations are hardly unique to the state. Between 1990 and 2008,
the number of Latinos living in Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina,
South Carolina and Tennessee grew by 602 percent, prompting political
scientists to dub the region the “Nuevo South.” “If you put your faith in the
Virginia voter,” Kaine recalled telling the candidate Obama in 2008, “You’re
going to win Virginia.”

Yet
the majority of Virginia’s General Assembly is still Republican, and only two
of its state-level representatives, the delegates Alfonso Lopez and Jason
Miyares, are Latino. Harry Wiggins, the chairman of Prince William County’s
Democratic Committee, described the problem like this: “We win the
presidential. We won for Mark Warner. We won for Tim Kaine. We won for Terry
McAuliffe. Yet the county board we lose, because they have off-year elections,
and we have very light turnout.”

Figueroa
is already preparing for the inevitable drop. “The numbers are going to plummet
next year in places that count, like Prince William,” he told me. In 2015, the
Census Bureau weighed Prince William County at 22.3 percent Latino, 21.8
percent African-American and 8.7 percent Asian. The chairman of its board of
supervisors, however, is Corey Stewart, a Republican, who is also chairman of
Donald Trump’s campaign in the state. “When he is president and I am governor,
you’re going to see one helluva tag team in Virginia, and we’re finally going
to remove illegal immigrants,” Stewart told
The Richmond Times-Dispatch in June. The gubernatorial race will occur next
year, when no other state in the country except New Jersey will be holding
elections.

While
Kaine spoke, Figueroa stood near the press box, tapping at his phone and taking
in the scene. In the days leading up to the rally, he mentioned several times
that he was working to make the event “blacker and browner.” His handiwork was
evident in the V.I.P. bleachers directly in front of the television cameras,
where a group of people sat, many of them wearing the unmistakable bright
blue-and-white jerseys of El Salvador’s national soccer team. They were
students, parents and teachers associated with the English-as-a-second-language
program at Huguenot High School and its International Club. Their V.I.P. seating
had come from Figueroa. Their homemade red, white and blue sign “Juntos Se Puede!” (“Together we can!”)
gave Kaine a camera-ready opportunity that he seized, pointing to them and
leading a round of “Sí se puede!”
— a chant that will always have special resonance for those who know that it
originated not in 2008 with Obama but with Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta in
1972.

After
Kaine finished his speech, as “Shake It Off” blasted through the gym, several
of these students joined the throng vying for an opportunity to snap a selfie
with him. I asked two of them what they knew about Kaine. “He was mayor of
Virginia,” one said. The other added that he had lived in Honduras and was a
friend of Latinos. That was all that they seemed to know. Two parents I spoke
with told me, in Spanish, that they understood only pieces of Kaine’s speech,
which was in English. This explained why one father appeared so poker-faced
through much of the rally. Unless his son translated the speeches for him, he
couldn’t form an opinion. He didn’t understand what was being said.

Marcela Valdes is a writer based in Maryland. She has served on the board of
directors of the National Book Critics Circle and has been a Nieman fellow at
Harvard University. Her last article for the magazine examined a documentary
about a California
hospital’s sterilizations of Mexican-American women in the early 1970s.Sign up for our
newsletter to get the best of The New York Times Magazine delivered
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A
version of this article appears in print on September 18, 2016, on page MM59 of
the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Dream in Blue. Today's Paper|Subscribe